I've been recently playing a lot of spelunky, and hey what do you know, i've played an updated spelunky version in my dream. Here are the things i've seen in it:

Two new side levels:

А bee hive level with a new bee-man character.

A water caves level with blueish rocks and small diamonds in the walls, almost every room had some water in it and there were falling stalagmites that could be used like ropes for a short amount of time, and i believe the entrance was in the old bitey area in the jungle.

Different hired help characters and behaviours, namely:

1) an archeologist, that has a hat and a suit similar to the spelunky guy, he stays at platforms a lot more, tends to climb on ledges, picks up ONLY pickaxe, uses it on crystals if they are directly under him

2) a carrier? dude with a big pack, he behaves similar to a default hired help, but never uses items that he picks up

3) a scientist? person in a lab coat, picks up only teleport and web gun, has mad skills in teleporting aka defragging enemies, shoots webgun on walls and climbs up this way

4) a werepanther man, never picks up items, has really long jumps, attacks with claws and bites enemies

5) a Kali cultist in a black and red robe that was confined in the prison in the jungle and if you did not have Kapala he attacked you, but joined you if you have it and he always picked up bodies and laid them on an altar when there was one in the level.

6) alien dude in a mecha suit that jumped on enemies heads and could hover on its jetpack (you could only get it in the mothership)

7) a bodyguard guy in a suit and cool glasses that stayed near you and tried to catch bullets, boomerangs and stuff with it's body.

8) a shadow ninja-like guy that tried to repeat all your movements but with a delay (he sometimes failed and then he just waited until you walk near him)

Also all hired help had parachutes, and it looked like they were infinite and differently coloured (randomly, i think, there were striped, two-colored and with a circle pattern).

The behaviour of the hired help was way different, for example some tend to run a bit on a distance from player and some tend to be really close, also you could stare at them and they stopped moving and when you ducked down they would drop the item they carry

The layouts were more funky, and there was this cool thing - community layouts, where you could fetch a number of custom layouts from a server and play with them, and you got a voting screen after a level where you could like or dislike every layout on a path you came through, and you could choose best or new or controversial for a method to choose layout.

There was layout editor where you were choosing a type from a huge list like mines pass, mines down pass, jungle idol, castle wall and so on, and then you were presented with a list of conditions and a 3 by 3 area (sometimes there was a level border) where you could edit the center piece and could generate sides again and again.

There were really cool layouts there, like custom 2 floor shops, small temples in mines and jungles, small jumping olmeks that resided in temples and could only be killed with bombs or pick, and so on.

You could sacrifice teleport in a mothership on a platform where there was a plasma cannon, and it made an upgrated teleport that seems to teleport you to a whole new chapter of 4 alien levels with alternate ending where you flew on a giant ufo over the volcano with a diamond alien statue as a trophy.

If you drop a mammoth in the pool of water and it shoots, the water becomes ice.

There were also yellow, red, blue, greenish and brown mushrooms growing on the ground, you could pick them up and eat them, and they gave different effects, and displayed alongside of your health for a couple of levels, and i believe that there were combinations that had cool effects, like walking on water, zooming out, slowing time and getting an acid spit that recharged over time, had one charge and was used with the same key that the whip.

And i recall that you could become a vampire somehow, you could fly then but you had to drink blood constantly or your health would decrease.

I was thinking about the hired help A.I. and how to implement it, and i thought about using three variables as the refrence to the state choosing - the state of the hired help itself (falling, in jump, swimming, on platform, etc), the state of the player (mostly the same), and the general state map of the level around for every cell (hostile, deadly, peaceful, dangerous). For example, when hh takes the idol on the temple levels, the state of the area around immediately becomes dangerous and it should run away, or so.